May 7, 2015

Tony Gilroy may have dropped the ball with The Bourne Legacy, but when he's on his game (Michael Clayton, Duplicity, the previous Bourne movies), he's one of the best screenwriters in the business. And for his newest effort, according to director Brad Anderson (Transsiberian, The Machinist), he's channeling his inner le Carré. "Tony may have been channeling John le Carré when he wrote this," he told Deadline, "and as such it has many of the themes I love that make those stories so great – the political intrigue, the betrayals, the morally compromised characters, the reluctant heroes. And it’s set in a world – war-torn Beirut – that’s seldom depicted on screen." The movie in question is High Wire Act. Anderson will direct for Radar Pictures, and Mad Men's Jon Hamm will star. According to the trade, the plot goes something like this: "Set in 1980s Beirut, Hamm plays a former U.S. diplomat who is called back into service to save a former colleague from the group possibly responsible for his own family’s death." Jon Hamm in a le Carré-esque Eighties-set political thriller directed by Brad Anderson and written by Tony Gilroy? I'm in!

2 comments:

I'm in too! Gonna be tricky for Hamm to shake off the Canadian Club-drenched shadow of Don Draper, but something like this film would be the way to go. Off-topic, but When I start thinking about actors playing against type, I sometimes wonder what it would be like to see French actress Juliette Binoche play an operative in a gritty French espionage thriller.

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About Me

Though I post here under the name Tanner, my real name is Matthew Bradford, and I'm a screenwriter living in Los Angeles. I'm coauthor of the graphic novel Night and Fog and I co-wrote and co-produced the 2014 horror feature Dead Within.